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If the linked post is an accurate overview, at least, it looks like Red Hat is doing a lot more contributing to GNOME's core, while Canonical is doing a lot more building of apps, widgets, and other miscellaneous desktop stuff on top of GNOME. Both seem like reasonable things for an open-source company to contribute. Linux desktop environments need more hacking on the core, and need more interesting things built on top of that core too.

If you look at the maintainance map [neary-consulting.com], you can see that Redhat is relavant in several areas, but most of it is volunteer. Canonical is not so relevant here (except for the default theme and the calculator -- lol).

Imagine your company was structured like that. Or that you'd have to sell this plan to your stakeholders.:) But it works!

1) Red Hat fans quote unfair (because they do not take stuff that is not accepted upstream, but may still be used by other distros into account, do not adjust for the fact that Red Hat has been around longer, only look at code contributions, not marketing or UI research etc.) numbers to try and prove that Ubuntu does not make a fair contribution to Linux development.

2) Mark Shuttleworth responds with a blog post in which he spins like a politician, fails to answer the questions directly, and accuses the cri

Except that as this report shows, Ubuntu has basically done jack shit to improve Linux usability.

This report doesn't show that. There are lots of code. Combining all that code to a package that is somewhat nice, well configured and works out of the box is damn important. Even more important is the massive amount of documentatiton that the Ubuntu community has created about pretty much everything. It would take an idiot not to recognize the value of those things. But let's take an example.

I have an extra computer in my house (but no extra monitors, etc.) and I decided to install it as a debian server. There was a slight complication, though: It is a bit noisy so I don't want to keep it in my bedroom and I also don't want to run cables all over the floors so I went to a shop to buy a wireless adapter. They are traditionally PITA on linux side so I went out to google for linux compatible devices first. I found an awesome list created by ubuntu community (didn't find anything comparable from anywhere else) and bought a device that worked out of the box on Ubuntu. I got home and tried to install it on Debian... Which I didn't succeed at. I found a guide, it had a number of broken driver links. Then I found more guides with more links. After an hour or so I was able to aquire the package... But I couldn't get past 'make'. Another hour trying to get past the problem for no avail. (for the record, I'm a sophomore year software engineering student going for bachelor's degree. And at some point I asked my roommate, sophomore going for CS degree in another university, for help). Then I gave up trying to do it that way, decided "Meh. I'll have to at least use stuff from Ubuntu repos anyway...", formatted debian, installed ubuntu and it all worked out of the box. As it always does with Ubuntu.

I haven't had much experience with red hat lately but the work that Canonical is doing is obviously valuable.

Essentially, Ubuntu is claiming that they've brought Linux to the desktop. Except they haven't. Red Hat has done more - 16 times as much, in fact - towards getting Linux on the desktop, but Canonical is taking all the credit for Red Hat's effort.

You may say that "As Red Hat has been around longer and contributed constantly the whole time and done a lot of marketing, etc... Their overall contribution to Linux exceeds Canonical's by a wide margin" and I would completely agree with that. But if you say "Red hat has contributed 16 times as much code == red had has contributes 16 times as much to bringing linux to desktop", you are very, very wrong.

Or, Ubuntu shipped non-free drivers and documented the hardware as supported without mentioning that clearly enough. I *think* Ubuntu does such things. Debian sure doesn't.

Actually they do. They only recently stopped including binary firmware blobs from the testing distribution. Now you might be tempted to call one a "driver", and the other "firmware", but they are both binaries loaded at runtime to make the hardware run. Debian has recognized this as a problem for a long time but had decided to distribute the blobs as a matter of practicality.

At the end of the day, one _seems_ to work and one completely doesn't.I wouldn't recommend Debian to "normal" people. Or even Ubuntu.

Ubuntu and the rest have made a lot of progress on "Desktop Linux" but they still have a long way to go. I used to prefer KDE to Gnome, but KDE seem to have lost their way or something, judging from their recent stuff.

Microsoft has lost their way too (the Win 9x/Win2K UI actually is not that badly thought out, then it got worse and worse from XP to Win 7), but they have the ad

Try installing XP on one of the newer Toshiba Satellites. It doesn't have drivers either. Does it mean it's a bad OS?

I wouldn't recommend to normal people that they install and setup Debian, but I wouldn't recommend them to install Windows either - both can be a pain in the ass. Getting a pre-installed machine [lxer.com] is the way to go, imo.

He probably did, but in the context of the discussion, it doesn't matter. What matters is that the latest stable Debian release didn't work and the latest stable Ubuntu release did. I had a similar experience recently with Debian. I have an engineering lab which runs Debian. When it came time to replace the computers, Lenny didn't support the network or video drivers on the new Intel Chipset. I was able to get the network driver compiled and working, but the video driver was a different story. The VESA dri

Kernel isn't defined that way. A specific type of kernel, like microkernel, might say that only the most core functions need to be in the actual kernel, but that is only one type of implementation. The Linux kernel is still a kernel, even if it includes more functionality than Minix's kernel.

Kernel modules don't matter. They are just a way of breaking up the loading process. Once a module is loaded, the code it contains is practically indistinguishable from compiled in code. That's why modules can be built-in instead of compiled as modules.

2. Canonical is a large, private company which has been around since 2004. If we compare the contributions only since 2004 then Red Hat has still contributed more code than Canonical: to EVERY part of the Linux stack. More egregiously if we compare the large, well-funded Canonical to small start ups like Litl, Collabora and Fluendo even then Canonical fails to contribute as much.

We've come a long way since our launch in 2004. We now have over 350 staff in more than 30 countries, and offices in London, Boston, Taipei, Montreal and the Isle of Man.

Everyone puts these Canonical freeloaders to shame.

You would indeed be wrong if you merely said "Red Hat contributes 16 times as much code". That's ONLY what they contribute to GNOME specifically. They develop the kernel, most of the toolchain for compilation, vast parts of the network stack, fonts,... basically bloody everything AND they do that by adhering to Free Software and SHARING EVERYTHING UPSTREAM where it's easy for any distro to benefit from their work.

I found an awesome list created by ubuntu community (didn't find anything comparable from anywhere else)

Not sure why you couldn't find it, but Mandriva has had a database of supported hardware since before I started using Linux (which was Mandrake 9.2, in 2003). Having a list of supported hardware certainly isn't a new idea.http://www.mandriva.com/hardware/ [mandriva.com]

installed ubuntu and it all worked out of the box. As it always does with Ubuntu.

Glad you've had good luck with it. Last couple times I've tried I couldn't even get the installer to boot. And when my brother tried it took 4 days to get his wifi card to work (a card which works out of the box with Mandriva.) Stuck with Mandriva for many

Maybe that coincided with the time when there were no free 3D drivers, and Red Hat forwarded the "Fuck You" from hardware vendors since they (a) hadn't the drivers developed yet and (b) had a principle problem with including proprietary drivers.

Then (in my opinion) Ubuntu et al not-so-strict distros included proprietory drivers, Linux became more present on the desktop, Hardware vendors noticed Linux. Open-source driver developers had more time and resources to continue and eventually brought forth free drivers.

In addition to that Debian, Red Hat and Novell and Intel and other honest players have spent huge amounts of time coding up Free drivers with the Nouveau project (free NVIDIA drivers [freedesktop.org]), Intel drivers [intellinuxgraphics.org], and ATI/AMD drivers [freedesktop.org]

I still remember time when all of fedora & RedHat said a big FUCK YOU to any user wanting reasonably working 3D on desktop. That's user friendly for sure.

I still remember the time when RedHat gave a big FUCK YOU to everyone who used RedHat, when they replaced it with Fedora, the alpha/beta testing ground for RHEL. At the same time, you cannot discount their massive contributions to the Linux environment, even if they are bad at portability. (Software packages developed specifically for redhat tend to be heavy on redhatisms and need substantial bashing before they will work in another environment.)

For me the important point is with which system can I get a computer working quicker and with less effort for installation and maintenance. Ubuntu wins.

Ubuntu wins for you. I suspect this is primarily related to your greater experience with Ubuntu. I, on the other hand, can set up a RHEL system much faster and with less effort for installation and maintenance than I can with Ubuntu. RHEL wins for me. Having done both, I can state objectively that there are fewer steps to get a working RHEL web server (for instance) than there are for Ubuntu.

you may say that this only reflects the superiority of APT over RPM

Well, compare apt to yum since those are more similar tools. Apt is faster, I'll grant you. Yum, on the other h

Superiority of APT over RPM? Get a clue. You can compare APT and YUM and how well they manage whatever packages your distro of choice have.

Fedora 13 installs everything I need for the laptop out of the box - wireless driver, mobile modem driver, even bloody compiz works on ATI mobility card without any additional requirements. YUM is rock solid for ages now. The only extra thing needed is rpmfusion repos to get proprietary codecs going.

That's complete BS. Like the link pointed out, they may be trying to submit stuff and it's not accepted. But even if that isn't the case the one thing that Ubuntu does much much better than anyone else is provide a huge collection of useful easy to read documentation that can be applied to most any Linux distro.

They may not be doing much coding work but they are making people more aware of Linux and rather than fighting each other and making the community look like a bunch of dicks we should appreciate w

But even if that isn't the case the one thing that Ubuntu does much much better than anyone else is provide a huge collection of useful easy to read documentation that can be applied to most any Linux distro......it needs people doing other things some of which Canonical are doing.

Except that Canonical's not doing that. The Ubuntu community is, and that's a totally different group of people. You're right that it's great work, and work that all of the free software community benefits from. But it's not work

Parent post, and the articles that are raising this "controversy", are comparing apples to oranges.

Red Hat and Canonical are both commercial entities. But Red Hat has been profitable for several years; Canonical has yet to generate a profit-- it is still in its start-up phase. One cannot expect a business that is still completely dependent on an angel's generosity for financing (thank you, Mark) to be as active in the community as a business that has a positive cash flow. Red Hat has the resources to pay

At the very least they should be taking all of the user feedback (read: complaints) that they receive on their forums, distilling it into useful bug reports, and passing that information up to the core developers to be fixed at the level where it can do the most good.

That doesn't make sense.

Canonical is quite likely not contributing code because the cost of doing so is too much during this start-up phase when they are working at a net loss. Doing the first hard and costly 80% of the debugging work on each current issue and passing that upstream for someone else to get the credit for the patches is very likely not in their best interest, either.

The hard part of bug squashing is sorting through all the reports to find the durn things. Actually coding the fixes is triv

The census is correct in implying that Canonical has not as many modules in upstream GNOME repositories, however that is only half the story. The census counts all commits since the beginning of the project, so Red Hat has a 6-year head start. Not to mention that Red Hat is a much bigger company than Canonical.

Canonical provides a lot of things of value to GNOME and the free software community in general. The (recently established) Canonical Design Team produces research [canonical.com] on software usability, the value of which is not easily quantifiable. Many pieces of GNOME software live on Launchpad and are not strictly part of GNOME upstream (Simple Scan, for instance). This might change if (or when) these modules are accepted in GNOME proper.

To claim that Canonical is freeloading on other companies' contributions is a bit of myopic, in my opinion. How many upstream bug reports came from Ubuntu users?

To claim that Canonical is freeloading on other companies' contributions is a bit of myopic, in my opinion. How many upstream bug reports came from Ubuntu users?

Too many, we marked them as dup. But your point is invalid since Canonical != Ubuntu users and Canonical != Ubuntu maintainers. Latter are all in the volunteer camp. Red Hat users & maintainers are probably largely there too.

The way I see it Ubuntu is mainly a packager (distribution) and behaves like one. They mainly configure, build and distribute the existing software. Of course they provide patches for bugs they encounter, and they send it upstream to reduce their own work.

But Canonical doesn't have the means and will to truly commit developer resources to Linux (like Red Hat does). They want to achieve something with what is there*, and they are very good at communicating, community-building, reacting to users, connecting users and developers. That is Ubuntu's value.Red Hat has some of this too, but for them it is business to engineer a Linux that works, because that is what they sell.

... But your point is invalid since Canonical != Ubuntu users and Canonical != Ubuntu maintainers. Latter are all in the volunteer camp....

I disagree. In principle, you are correct, Canonical, as a company, has nothing to do with me, as a user, filing a bug report on some piece of software. However, how many of these bug reports would exist in the first place if not for Ubuntu, for which Canonical is largely (if not wholly) responsible? Something about eyeballs and shallow bugs.

For me, Canonical succeeded where most other companies did not, in marketing Linux and GNOME as user-friendly solutions, which in turn, I believe, will draw developers to produce more software for Linux.

Whilst this is, in part, due to the relative maturity of both products, for which Red Hat is largely responsible, I believe that GNOME benefits greatly from Canonical's approach towards user-friendliness as much as Canonical benefits from the infrastructure on which they base their products. Canonical has produced great software (like Upstart) which may not be obvious.

To claim that Canonical is freeloading on other companies' contributions is a bit of myopic, in my opinion.

'Freeloading' often has a negative meaning, but in open source land the opposite is true IMHO. Any additional user helps to improve the software just by using it:

Increased user base means increased market share, bringing open source software closer to the point where companies take Linux support more serious for their products, governments may take a 2nd look at their open source use & support for open standards, websites are checked more often in alternative (read: non-IE) browsers, etc, etc.

More users = more testers, more bug reports etc. This ultimately helps the software quality, if more bugs are found (& hopefully, fixed).

More users = (over time) more experienced users, that can help newcomers get started.

So regardless of who deserves credits, that's many networks effects that benefit all users of such software, Gnome included. Freeriding on that is about as harmful as watching new years' fireworks without lighting any of your own - you still contribute to the party, just by being there. And in that sense, Canonical has done a lot to support Linux - by attracting & supporting many new users.

Sure it is. Community and users are a resource. They can an asset to either a succesful company (Red Hat) which has a consistent, strong track record of contributing vast amounts of Free Software to every part of the stack (from kernel on up to network and sound management, to the desktop and free fonts) OR they can be expended by a (so far) commercially unsuccesful hobby company (Canonical) which is devoted to recouping Mark Shuttleworth's lost millions and has so far failed to contribute anything of no

Your argument made me feel nostalgic for the days when using Linux meant testing software and filing bug reports. Now I use Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) and that world is forever lost to me. I am hooked on freeloading. Everything just works and I just let it.

Many pieces of GNOME software live on Launchpad and are not strictly part of GNOME upstream (Simple Scan, for instance).

That's the problem: Canonical is not doing the hard work to get what little they do write upstream. Stuff that is not upstream is just balkanized, fractured, non-maintainable code. It doesn't provide any benefit to the rest of the GNU/Linux community, i.e. the people that write all the rest of the code and upstream it so that Canonical can exist in the first place.
Usability research is useful, but when I click your link I see one study (on Empathy) and further clicking around on the Canonical Design team site reveals [canonical.com] that, as so much of Canonical appears to be, it's all about marketing. Seriously: ONE study and then three guides devoted to "guidelines to support the brand documentation and help create consistent brand usage."?

Canonical provides a lot of things of value to GNOME and the free software community in general. The (recently established) Canonical Design Team produces research [canonical.com] on software usability, the value of which is not easily quantifiable. Many pieces of GNOME software live on Launchpad and are not strictly part of GNOME upstream (Simple Scan, for instance). This might change if (or when) these modules are accepted in GNOME proper.

The Ubuntu fanboys enjoy ripping on Red Hat for not contributing to the desktop, and for being a boring company focusing only on the serverside of things. Seems like that position is bullshit. People are also claiming that Red Hat doesn't care about the desktop, which this proves is also pure crap. For the people positioning Ubuntu as the desktop champion of GNU/Linux they're not contributing anywhere. Not the kernel, not GNOME, no where are they contributing a significant amount of patches. And all the apo

And why with all that head start is Ubuntu more popular today than Fedora?

It might be because Ubuntu isn't based in the US and thus can integrate tools to get patented software codecs easier installed. They've also made it easier to install proprietary drivers, which is always a mess in Fedora. So, the difference is Red Hat actually does open source and is rather fundamental about it, while Ubuntus morals are more flexible.

They've also made it easier to install proprietary drivers, which is always a mess in Fedora.

[citation required]And not just a post by an Ubuntu user who heard it off a friend. I hear this every day and never met anyone who has supporting evidence. Along with "Fedora is just for servers", "Fedora uses bleeding edge so nothing works" and "there be dragons in them hills".

I install Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora on university machines on a daily basis. There is no massive discerning difference between these distributions that makes one much easier for 3d drivers than the other. All three have package repos f

I install Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora on university machines on a daily basis. There is no massive discerning difference between these distributions that makes one much easier for 3d drivers than the other. All three have package repos for proprietary drivers and are as easy to set up.

I find it difficult to believe that you install three different distros on a single entities machines on a daily basis.
Why would anyone do that? Why create such an IT headache by intentionally deploying three separate distros on apparently a huge number of machines, or why continually re-install three differnt distros on the same machines when it's obviously not working (if it were, you wouldn't have to re-install so often).

I install whichever OS they ask for. I also install Windows XP and getting the accelerated drivers for that is actually a pain. Why all three? Because there are Suse fans who feel most comfortable using Suse. Because there are multiprocessor simulators which are distributed only in.deb packages. Because, and I really must strongly emphasise this, there really isn't much of a difference between the distributions and there are no dragons!. They are all collections of the same software. If I solve a bug on on

Because, and I really must strongly emphasise this, there really isn't much of a difference between the distributions and there are no dragons!.

Distributions create their own bugs all the time. Fedora shipped some wacky patch once that killed DVD-ROM drives, there are certainly dragons. The problem is that the dragons are invisible until you trip over them.

Did you miss that it's a university? Logic need not apply, especially in turf wars where CS, Physics, and 3 different engineering departments all disagree on what OSes are acceptable, and IT has no authority to settle it because they're staff, not faculty. If you can get by on 2-3 Windows versions, Mac OS X, and 3 Linux distros, you're doing pretty well.

I don't need a citation, because I was stating an opinion. I have an IdeaPad with a broadcom wireless chipset in it, that never installs right. Also, after they've included nouveau in the standard distribution, installing the binary driver is a headache. And sometimes it just continues to load, even if you blacklist it and remove it from the kernel line in the grub config. You might think the nouveau driver is great, but for actual use it's not. In fact, it wasn't even able to set up a

One interesting observation about the contributions on language bindings: Obviously volunteers are mostly into scripting languages (Python, Perl), while each compiled language is dominated by a single company (C++ by Openismus, Java by Operation dynamics, and C# by Novell).

Canonical's code contribution is irrelevant. What open source has always needed is some polish and some marketing. Thats what canonical provide, they polished and marketed (to an extent) a decent distro. OSS has never been short of decent code and quality software engineering. Canonical are providing a great link in the value chain of linux and as long as the basic prinicipals are upheld im all for it!

Well if you really want to get anal, why no mention of GNU? Without GNU there would be no Linux.

I just really don't get what the complaining is about. Isn't the whole point of the free software movement to get a nice stable OS built? So what's the problem with Ubuntu? Is it now Freedom with Caveats? If Ubuntu were somehow violating the GPL, that would be one thing, but the complaint seems to be that they're taking advantage of what the GPL was set up to enable... The "debate" sounds more like pe

And this is exactly why it works. Do you see Google marketing Android as Linux based? Certainly not anywhere outside of it's dev community.

Linux, believe it or not, has a bit of a scary co-notation with the general public. Sure, it has come a long way from being called "for hackers only", but it's not there yet. Calling it Ubuntu and dropping the Linux reference is a GREAT idea. I would recommend it to anyone starting a new distro.

Cocoa-based-candy may sound great to you, but I'll just have my Chocolate tha

When it comes to bugs and usability problems, Ubuntu run a much sharper bug tracker - it usually has coverage of almost any minor GNOME issue. Between Canonical and their users, It might have taken many man-hours to track down, discuss and identify a small usability bug, which might only result in a fix of a few lines of code. It's not about turning the screw, it's knowing which screw to turn [tumblr.com]. So counting lines of code as the only contribution is completely unfair to Canonical.

This doesn't just go for GNOME; the best discussion of kernel and firefox bugs usually ends up being hosted on Ubuntu, just because they have fostered the largest community of enthusiastic Linux desktop users.

Really? Because all I've ever seen while browsing Ubuntu forums is someone posting a problem, followed by 12 pages of people going "me too!" and a few "so, does anyone know how to fix this yet?" It's the AOL of linux distributions. And its not like I haven't tried Ubuntu before. The problems that I've run into with it generally require me to step outside of the approved Ubuntu point-and-click way of doing things and edit config files by hand. Nothing is where it should be, and often my manual changes g

This doesn't just go for GNOME; the best discussion of kernel and firefox bugs usually ends up being hosted on Ubuntu, just because they have fostered the largest community of enthusiastic Linux desktop users.

And that's a huge problem, because it tends to stay there. It's awfully hard to make the argument that it's helpful to upstream to explicitly tell your users "Use our bugtracker," and then fail to kick that upstream. Launchpad's an echo chamber.

#ubuntu on freenode is just as bad. Though, that's mostly because there are worse than 10 people with problems to every one with an answer. You still get your share of trolls etc just like anywhere else, but the ops usually remove them quickly.

None of them would ever consider investigating bugs, talking to people upstream, downloading the code, submitting patches.

They're users. Most simply don't have the know-how to do these things, and it's unreasonable to expect them to, especially in the "downloading code and submitting patches" department. You make it sound like a trivial thing for even hobbyist programmers to do, especially with the bloated, ad hoc codebases they'd probably be dealing with. And if you're hearing from them, they are talking to upstream. Upstream to Ubuntu users is the Ubuntu forums or Canonical.

I think a lot are pointing out which dishes suck. They may not be able to tell you exactly why and how, but if your target is the general public, that's useful info if you know how to sort it out properly.

> All this noise distracts from the real contributors who actually do the work, quietly, productively and without much of a fanfare.

If the bug reports are distracting the workers then it's the fault of the organization.

The issue is that there are no developers there. There are just users talking authoritatively at other users. You get no inflow of information and the same rumours, bad advice, scaremongering stories are stated again and again.

For example: One person blogs about KMS now working on Intel cards and how plymouth will use this, next person says that nvidia and ati wont be supported by plymouth, the next person blames his system crash on plymouth as that was the thing that was on the screen during the boot, the

If you want to get paid for what you do then charge for it. I don't mean money necessarily. There are lots of ways of getting paid. But charge something.

In this case the reciprocal amount of work people are demanding from Canonical is a form of payment. If you want to claim it's not "fair" that one company is doing more for a project than another you've got to set up the system to stop them, otherwise you have no grounds for your complaint. You can't set up a stall with a big sign saying "Free, please take what you want, no need to give anything back in return" and then moan when someone takes you up on your offer.

I wasn't going to post but maybe this is the reason for the tribal comments.There is no value in measuring contributions by various sections of the linux community commercial or others.

Red hat makes valuable contributions so does Cannonical, so do many other companies other than SCO i think we can agree on that. I have a bias towards ubuntu it works on my systems and i am familiar with it. However i don't think the sun shines out of cannonicals arse , that now belongs to oracle.

but seriously measuring contributions made by other people is divisive and unnecessary. I've contributed in a few area's and just helping newbies is a contribution that most can make. The size of the contribution doesn't matter. Redhat is commercially successful and turns a profit mark shuttleworth pumps money into Linux via ubuntu and the parent seems to say that isn't good enough do more.

Measuring contributions is a useful way to see what is an efficient way of generating Free Software vis a vis differe

The reason why RedHat's piece of GNOME commits is so big is because they have been rejecting modules developed by competing companies. Novell made a push to get their start menu included in GNOME, it was rejected by the RedHat majority. Same thing with Compiz, a compositing window manager developed by David Reeveman of Novell, also rejected despite it being an almost complete drop in replacement for Metacity which is ancient RedHat technology. He also worked on bringing OpenGL into xorg and had a working prototype for how to do it. Also rejected because RedHat favored a different approach by writing AIGLX [wikipedia.org]. The reason why Novell doesn't have a large stake in GNOME's codebase is certainly not for a lack of trying. There are dozen more modules that have been rejected over the years. What they all have in common is that RedHat employers aren't working on them.

Then check what modules have had no problem getting included: PulseAudio, Clutter, DeviceKit, Cheese, gnome-user-share... All created by RedHat employers. Basically, when it comes to the core of GNOME's infrastructure, RedHat has been very effective in keeping outsiders out.

Same thing with Compiz, a compositing window manager developed by David Reeveman of Novell, also rejected despite it being an almost complete drop in replacement for Metacity which is ancient RedHat technology.

Metacity ancient? What do you make of the whole X server then? Should we replace it too?
Don't get me wrong. I don't dismiss Compiz as eye-candy because it's far more than that.
It came way to early. It was unusable without proprietary drivers and unstable with.
To this day Compiz has p

I notice that Clutter is an intel project. I notice that Cheese is crashy and slow. I notice that Xgl died in favor of a solution which still isn't here, and that more of the system was composited when we had it. In fact, I notice that Compiz window effects (since you bring it up) worked probably three times faster/smoother under Xgl than they do under the modern AIGLX desktop.

Metacity ancient? What do you make of the whole X server then? Should we replace it too?

Large parts of it have been replaced already. Xgl provided DRAMATIC performance improvements, I know, because I've actually run it.

Novells menu for GNOME is crap! I just used it again on my mothers Netbook and you actually can not use it at all. When ever you want to launch a not-so-often-used application program. It is faster to launch gnome-terminal and start it from there than go "all programs" -list.The "favorites" is such that you have difficulties to get it ordered as you want. Or to get all wanted favorites there but still keep the most used list big enough, even with 1920x1200 resolution. KickOff is much better what Novell did

I don't think all your examples are good and I believe there is some mis-attribution in there as well. Let's start with the ones that might support your argument. PulseAudio (Lennart Poettering), DeviceKit (David Zeuthen) and gnome-user-share (Alexander Larsson and Bastien Nocera) were all created by Red Hat employees. I would argue that neither Xorg/X, DeviceKit or PulseAudio are part of GNOME even though it runs on top of them. They are really Linux desktop infrastructure and someone's got to develop that

Greg DeKoenigsberg, an ex-Red Hat employee wrote a blog post slamming Canonical for the "absolutely egregious" statistic and suggesting that Canonical has been "riding on Red Hat's coattails for years."
Tough shit. This is open source, if you don't like others using your work you should develop proprietary software instead.

But all that copying of the same bits, that puts a huge stress on them (especially the 1s). The bits that make up this open-source software could fail at any time, due to everyone using them. Think of the bits!

No one is complaining that Canonical uses Red Hat's work in their product. One developer is merely troubled that Canonical gets more recognition than they deserve, given their meager contributions to the GNU/Linux software ecosystem.

As a user, I don't care in the slightest who committed more patches, or lines of code.

What I do care about is how easy and convenient it is to use a particular distro. And there Ubuntu offers a lot. Try to play an MP3 file? Fail on Fedora out of the box; with Ubuntu, you get a dialog asking you if it's okay to download the codec - a single click, a brief wait, and it Just Works.

Or take drivers. As soon as it boots, Ubuntu prompts me to let it install proprietary NVidia drivers. A single click, and I have a 3D enabled system which actually works and has performance decent enough for gaming. Fedora? Either join the bug hunt with noveau, or search for a 3rd-party repository providing what you want.

Yeah, yeah, I know, Free Software is supposed to good for your karma, and friends don't let friends use proprietary crap. And Red Hat are your friends, right?..

... does anyone actually care?

Well, I guess some people do, and those people stick to Fedora. Judging by the amount of users it has compared to Ubuntu (and other distros who don't shove "FOSS only" into their users' throats), it's not as popular as some people would like it to be.

The linked blog post by an ex-RedHatter is dripping with venom over how Ubuntu "beats everyone at marketing", but totally misses the point. Ubuntu beats everyone at convenience and "just working" first and foremost; marketing is just icing on that cake. You want to make a principled stand over FOSS? Fine, but then don't complain when users flock elsewhere!

I am perfectly well informed about what FOSS and its philosophy is, what the implications are, etc. As a programmer, I see some relevance in it, but even then I also see that its applicability is rather narrow. As a user, it really concerns me very little in practice. It's not the only solution to DRM, for example, and even then I do not find all DRM to be worth fighting (over a hundred games in my Steam account and still buying more, for example...).

Childish stuff like this [windows7sins.org] does not help at all, by the way

Again you miss the point. Everyone credits Ubuntu for it, because Ubuntu actually uses that code for things that most people need - such as e.g. downloading MP3 codec - which Fedora doesn't even have in its repositories. What good is the code if it's not ever used for the benefit of the user?

I also don't agree with the claim that only 23.45% of contributions come from volunteers. There is also the 16.94% "unknown". Now, if you're working on Gnome for a company, you usually would want to list your affiliation. If you don't, maybe you're contributing to Gnome on company time without your bosses knowing, but such a situation should (arguabl

I find it ironic that Redhat are the ones complaining about Ubuntu, while it was Redhat who exited the desktop market years ago, focusing on the server side of things. This void that was created was filled by Ubuntu, and it has become successful. Fedora is not quite the same, since it is bleeding edge, with not stable releases.

Ubuntu's success is well deserved. They fill a much needed part in the Linux arena.

Counting patches from before Canonical existed is inaccurate and biased. And patches are not the only measure. There is packages, polish, community building and marketing.

There are almost thirty thousand packages available from Canonical's repositories. Assembling a coherent, working Linux distribution from a selection of available packages is, in itself, a massive work of engineering. Given that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution for desktops, there's a strong case that they've designed the best available distribution for that niche.

If Canonical had contributed no software at all to GNOME, they would still be making a significant contribution to the free software ecosystem.

Even if Canonical would contribute no code at all, they contribute something that has been traditionally painfully missing from Linux: marketing and PR. The number of GNOME *users* contributed by Canonical by far outweighs the lack of missing code lines.

It would be nice if people would think a bit less about ego and a bit more about the overall success of Linux, whatever flavor of Linux it may be.

Uh... Prevented me being locked out, differently from situations like when Commodore died and took Amiga with it, or when IBM decided to drop OS/2?
If you ever invested time to learn and to program for a now-dead OS/API/whatever, you would know how it feels to face a closed door when it dies.

The success of companies like Microsoft, or more recently, Apple, come from multiple things. Sure, you need the code, but you also need the design, the art work, and the marketing. For the longest time the open source "world" only had the code. In the last few years it got the design and art work (You don't have to go too far back for the days where Linux didn't support any kind of good font engine, and all the themes/icons were rubbish).